If you’ve spent much time in Salt Lake City, you’ll know the This is the Place Monument by the artist Mahonri Young. I hadn’t thought much more of it than being the giant granite thing with statues you drive by on the way to the zoo. When it was built in the 1940s, it must have been much more monumental perched on the bench where you could see it from most anywhere in the north end of the valley, but now it’s been a bit crowded by development. It’s also been incorporated into a much larger historical/educational facility, This is the Place Heritage Park, where, beginning in the 1970s, the state relocated or rebuilt nineteenth-century buildings.
I find it fascinating how the new context of the park treats the monument itself as a kind of historical relic—originally a modern commemoration of a historical event, now it’s a remnant of mid-twentieth century Utah/Mormon history. I think that historicized position is probably a good thing, since it opens some space between our understanding of the monument and our interpretation of the history that it represents. Whereas its creators would have preferred us to think about it as a transparent representation of the settlement of Utah, it’s hard not to see it now as a window on what that history meant to mid-twentieth century Utahns, and how they employed the representation of their ancestors of 1847 to further their own interests a century later.
While I was teaching at the University of North Dakota, two of my colleagues and I were intrigued by the similarities between the This is the Place Monument and another memorial halfway around the world—the Voortrekker Monument in Pretoria, South Africa. Both were built by white settler groups to commemorate their ancestors’ journeys to settle the remote interiors of their respective colonies. And both migrations had been spurred by conflict with other white settlers. The two monuments are physically very different, but they include a number of remarkably similar elements, especially in their construction of historical narratives that justify settlement and assert their sponsoring communities as the fittest, most deserving, and most successful settlers.
While these similarities were intriguing, a number of much more interesting questions arose when we realized that placing the monuments in comparison revealed places where each monument spoke through silence. This is especially evident in their representation of race. The Voortrekker Monument is aggressively vocal in asserting the racial superiority of the white Voortrekkers over the Indigenous peoples whose lands they colonized. Black Africans are represented throughout as threatening, savage, and duplicitous; hardly a surprise in a monument to Afrikaner Nationalism erected just as the Apartheid system was being encoded into South African law.
Viewed from this perspective, the This is the Place Monument is bizarrely silent about race. The only conflict its pioneers are shown engaging is with nature (in a relief depicting the Donner Party struggling to pull wagons through the canyon), and not with the Native peoples with whom Mormons violently clashed on numerous occasions over decades. The only Native American represented on This is the Place is Chief Washakie of the Northern Shoshone, represented in a full-figure portrait on the monument’s reverse.
Far from being threatening, Washakie seems totally approachable—his expression is pacific, he presents a “peace pipe” with his right arm and holds a ceremonial weapon down at his side with his left, signaling his desire not to fight. Furthermore, the monument’s inscription informs viewers that Washakie was a “close friend of Brigham Young and the Mormon people.”
The presence of Washakie and the absence of any other Native figures—including the numerous, well-known opponents of Brigham Young and the Mormon people—leaves viewers with a false sense that Mormon colonization of the Great Basin was characterized by interracial harmony. It reinforces white Utahns’ self-congratulatory narrative of having fed rather than fought Indians, while denying a voice to the multiple Native nations still very present in the state in 1947.
I don’t think that Mahonri Young and the others who helped plan and execute the monument thought of Native Americans as a significant part of twentieth-century Utah. I get the sense that to Young and his colleagues, Native people seemed more like historical relics, a fringe population whose presence really only mattered in the past. There’s a note in Mahonri Young’s papers with a joke about the monument’s dedication ceremony:
“Young said they told him he could have ten minutes and he took less than two, ‘the shortest talk of the day.’ Dr. John Sharp, a brother-in-law, said, ‘I beg your pardon, Hon [Mahonri’s friends called him ‘Hon’], Wasikie—grandson of Chief Wasikie—depicted on the monument, made the shortest talk of the day—’Ugh-h-h!'”
It’s worth considering whose place the This is the Place Monument claims Utah is. It’s also been fascinating exploring how monuments by other settler groups reveal how the broader discourse of early twentieth-century colonialist commemoration informed what This is the Place chose to show, and what it chose to conceal. For much, much more detail on this comparison, check out our first publication, “Enshrining Gender in Monuments to Settler Whiteness: South Africa’s Voortrekker Monument and the United States’ This Is the Place Monument,” which was generously made open-access by the journal Humanities. I’ll be posting soon about how the monument represents gender—and I’ll also add an update about another forthcoming piece where we look even more specifically at the issue of race.
We were lucky to have a huge amount of scholarship to draw on as we thought about the politics of representation in public monuments. I was especially delighted to find that Sara M. Patterson has already been doing amazing scholarship on this very issue in relation to Mormon monuments, including the This is the Place Monument. Her book, Pioneers in the Attic: Place and Memory Along the Mormon Trail, which just came out last summer, is a really important reconsideration of “Mormon history” as a meaningful concept in the present, not an objective collection of facts about the past.